Perhaps Love
by Lania26
Summary: Viktor Krum is struggling to come to terms with his new life of money and fame, while battling memories of things past. With the appearance of a beautiful young nurse, Viktor realizes that life still holds meaning and redemption is within his grasp.


Author's Note: J.K owns everything

This is just a little story about Viktor Krum, who I felt like was a much deeper character than he was portrayed to be in the books, and I always wondered how he dealt with his actions in the Triwizard Tournament. Here is my attempt at portraying Viktor's life after the tournament.

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Viktor Krum sat atop his broomstick, suspended hundreds of feet in the air, trying desperately to focus on locating the ever elusive golden snitch. But it seemed like the more he tried, the more distracted he became.

It had been three months since the final task of the Triwizard Tournament. He had graduated top in his class, renewed his multimillion galleon contract with the Bulgarian Quidditch team, and moved from dreary and desolate Durmstrang to bustling Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria. However, he was coming to realize that no amount of money or fame could shake the horror and disgrace of what he had faced in the maze during the final task.

Although his conscious mind could only hazily recall the horrors he had experienced in the maze, to his unconscious mind the memories were as clear as day, and he was constantly plagued with nightmares. In these dreams, Viktor was a spectator of himself, and he was forced to watch as he ambushed Fleur, cursing her from behind and watching as she crumpled to the ground. Every night he tried calling out to her—to warn her against himself—and every night he failed. Worse were the dreams of Cedric, because in those dreams he was the one who cast the killing curse. He knew he wasn't responsible for Cedric Diggory's death, that it had really been Lord Voldemort, but watching Cedric die by his hand night after night was not something he could easily move past, and it left him feeling sullied and shaken.

He couldn't remember it, but he was told that once Harry Potter had returned to Hogwarts by the portkey, half-dragging Cedric's body, tournament officials had swarmed the maze, stunned Viktor, and taken him for questioning. Once they realized he was under the Imperius curse, they removed it, and from there Viktor's memory was restored.

He could still recall how Fleur had flown at him, screaming obscenities in French and pummeling him with her fists. It took two officials to hold her back, and several minutes before she absorbed the fact that Viktor had been under the Imperius curse. Once she did, she had collapsed against him, staining his robes with her tears. He also remembered watching as Cedric Diggory's parents sobbed into eachother's arms, their grief palpable.

Losing Cedric had been a blow to so many. And it was clear to Viktor that he had been much loved. Even though he had known Cedric for such a short time, and had been his rival during the tournament, Viktor realized that Cedric had possessed honesty, integrity, strength, and kindness, and that these were the qualities that had endeared him to everyone he met.

And now he was gone. Viktor had watched him walk into the maze and had seen his body carried out. He had seen Cedric full of life and looked upon him in death. And not only was it the loss of a good man that bothered him, it was also the realization that it could have been him.

If he had reached that portkey first, he might have been the one carried out on a stretcher. But would people have mourned him for anything other than his Quidditch skills? Viktor hoped that they would have, but with little family and few friends, he wasn't very confident.

Viktor Krum, sitting atop his broom above the Quidditch pitch, was battling the realization of his own mortality. Luckily he didn't have to think on it for long.

"VIKTOR, LOOK OUT!"

Upon hearing his name, Viktor did what anyone who had forgotten years of Quidditch practice would do; he turned toward the source of the noise and was hit directly in the face by a bludger.

The bludger connected with his nose with a loud "SNAP!" and he felt the warm flow of blood gushing down his face as he lost contact with his broom, falling rapidly towards the ground.

Barely fifty feet from the ground, he collided with several of his teammates, which slowed his momentum enough so that he merely slammed _into _the ground and did not go _through_ it.

_This must be what it feels like to break every bone in your body _he thought, before he succumbed to unconsciousness.

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"Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God! My first day on the job and Viktor Krum falls off his broom. I can't believe it! I must me the most unlucky nurse alive!"

Though his mind was still foggy and all he could see was darkness, Viktor was groggily beginning to realize that he wasn't alone, as a tiny female voice continued its panicked whispering.

"He is the s_tar player_, Oh God, I can't believe this!"

The barely audible voice was having quite an impact on Viktor and he couldn't take it any longer. He opened his eyes and looked upon the face of an angel.

And when he said an angel that's exactly what he meant. A ball of light was hovering over the young woman's head, making her pale blonde hair appear as a halo around her face, and her large green eyes were so wide and expressive that it took his breath away. (Later the logical part of his brain would argue that this also could have been a reaction to his abrupt impact with the earth.)

He had just a moment to register that the incredibly expressive eyes were now screaming extreme alarm when she literally squeaked out, "Your awake!" so loud that he felt the vibrations ringing in his ears for several seconds afterwards.

The woman must have noticed the pain her reaction caused because she guiltily exclaimed in a more moderate tone, "Oh, I'm so sorry! Sometimes when I get nervous my voice gets really high. But I'm so happy that you're awake."

"I'm Nurse Metanova," she continued. "How do you feel?"

"Better," Viktor replied. And he did indeed feel much better.

"You suffered quite a fall. I've fixed your nose and mended several of your ribs and both wrists. You're so lucky to be alive."

"Thanks to you," Viktor replied in such an uncharacteristically sappy and wistful voice that he felt himself cringe with mortification.

Luckily Nurse Metanova just smiled. "No, thanks to your teammates." She gestured to three neighboring beds where Viktor's teammates were still lying unconscious. He realized, much to his embarrassment, that he hadn't even noticed anything aside from the striking nurse in front of him.

She began to move away but some imperceptible need caused Viktor to reach out and surround her tiny white wrist in his large dark hand.

"Wait," he called somewhat desperately. "I haven't seen you here before. Are you new?"

The nurse focused her gaze on her feet before replying.

"Yes. Is it that obvious? I've been training with Nurse Kuznetsova for a couple of weeks, but today was my first day by myself." She rolled her eyes as if to say, _and look at what a mess I've made of things._

Viktor thought he detected a faint blush on her cheeks and instantly sought to ease her embarrassment.

"It isn't your fault that I lost focus and fell off my broom. I'm just lucky you were there to fix me."

Upon hearing this, Nurse Metanova raised her eyes from the floor and smiled, placing her hand on Viktor's shoulder and gently lowering him back down onto the bed. "Thank you, but it wasn't your fault either. Now please try to rest while I check on your teammates. Is there anything else I can do for you?"

Although Viktor's brain rapidly conjured up several tantalizing possibilities, his mouth thankfully remained silent.

As Viktor Krum watched Nurse Metanova walk away he was struck by the feeling that nothing in his life was ever going to be the same.

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_Later that Day…_

Karina Metanova was running late. As usual.

She was supposed to meet her youngest brother, Mischa, for lunch fifteen minutes ago. It didn't matter that this time she had a perfectly logical reason for being late, she still felt guilty.

As she was crossing the street, she spotted him sitting outside their favorite café and a smile immediately lit up her face.

"Mischa. I'm so sorry I'm late." She said as she attempted to mask her happy smile with a more apologetic expression.

"When aren't you late?" Mischa joked, a bright smile lighting up his own face, before pulling her into a big bear hug.

"You'll never believe what I was doing?"

"Let's see…" he mused."Reading? Sleeping? Eating chocolate?"

Karina just rolled her eyes in mock annoyance before taking her seat at the table. There was no need to look at the menu because she had been here a thousand times and she always ordered the same thing anyways.

"No. I was saving Viktor Krum's life."

Mischa choked on the beer he was drinking before exclaiming, "Good God! Is he OK!"

Karina allowed herself a small smile, before assuring Mischa of his hero's safety. Once she had explained Viktor Krum's injuries to Mischa's absolute horror she offered up the possibility that he had also suffered a mild concussion due to the really weird, dazed look on his face she had observed while talking to him.

After she had finished, Mischa immediately began offering up a list of implausible excuses as to why Viktor had fallen off his broom, such as he had had a seizure, or he had been temporarily blinded by the sun.

"He told me that he just wasn't paying attention." Karina replied, to which Mischa was immediately offended.

"Wasn't paying attention? This is Viktor Krum we're talking about, the best seeker in a century. Viktor Krum is always paying attention."

Karina was silent as Mischa gushed about Viktor Krum and his expert Quidditch skills. She tried to appear like she was interested and nodded her head occasionally, but she was really thinking of how fond she was of her brother.

Mischa was the youngest out of her Russian family's four children. Karina loved all of her brothers, but Mischa was the dearest to her because they were the closest in age and had spent the most time together. In fact Mischa was almost exactly one year younger than Karina and they had been inseparable until Karina had been sent to an all girl's school in Estonia when she was 11. The next year, Mischa started at Durmstrang. He was actually still a student but he illegally apparated to their favorite café every other Saturday.

As she considered Mischa, she once again realized how different they looked. Mischa was tall, with unruly brown hair, and multiple piercings, while she was very blonde and rather petite. In fact, she looked so different from the other members of her family that her brothers had teased her constantly when she was younger by saying that they had found her in a basket on their doorstep and that she wasn't really their sister at all.

"Karina?" Mischa's voice interrupted her musings. "Karina, have you even heard a word that I've said?"

"Of course," she lied. "You were talking about Viktor Krum."

Mischa sighed, shaking his head in disbelief, completely perplexed by his sister's lack of enthusiasm for Quidditch.

"You know, you are probably the only person in the entire wizarding world who doesn't give a damn about Quidditch. And here you are healing the best player in a century. The irony is overwhelming."

"I know. I know." Karina agreed with a sigh of her own. "Well look on the bright side, Mischa. I might not care a whit about Quidditch, but I can still get you, Ivan, and Aleks season tickets to all the home games."

For the second time that day, Mischa choked on his drink. This time he managed to splutter out an excited, "You can?" before starting a new tirade about Quidditch, Viktor Krum, and the possibility of seeing them both live on a regular basis.

"You know, Karina. You're my favorite sister." He added happily.

Karina stared at her brother, half exasperated and half amused. "I'm you're only sister, Mischa."

"Exactly."

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Across town, Viktor Krum was sitting in a crowded bar, surrounded by teammates, feeling completely and utterly alone.

They all wanted an explanation as to why he had fallen off his broom, but even in his mind he couldn't come up with a logical excuse. It was so out of character for him to lose focus, even in a scrimmage, that no one would believe that he simply hadn't been paying attention. Not to mention that if he told them he was too busy considering the frailty of the human body to notice the bludger zooming towards his head, they would have laughed and told him to stop messing around.

Viktor noticed that most people thought he was stupid because he didn't talk much. It was his opinion that people who talked too much only _proved_ themselves to be stupid.

"I bet I know vhy he fell!" yelled Igor, one of the reserve beaters. "He vas probably imagining that new nurse naked and lost control of his broomstick, if you know vhat I'm saying."

Everyone around them laughed and started yelling raunchy comments, while Viktor struggled to keep his composure.

"If you are talking about Nurse Metanova, Ivan, I would ask you to please shut up. As I recall, you were unconscious until she took care of you."

"Come on Viktor," said a grinning Pasha Chernenko. "Igor, was just kidding."

"Well I'm tired. I'm going to go home before I get piss-drunk like the rest of you." And with that, Viktor Krum stalked out of the bar and into another lovely summer night.

As the cool air calmed his nerves, Viktor realized that he probably shouldn't have blown up on Igor like he had. He wasn't usually the type to get angry, but sometimes Igor took things too far. And as much as he hated to admit it, he hated to hear someone as lovely as Nurse Metanova degraded by someone as crude as Igor.

He wasn't quite sure what it was about her that had him so enamored, but whatever it was, it was really freaking him out. He hadn't been able to shake the image of her face from his memory, or remove the touch of her soft skin from his nerve endings. It had felt like an electric jolt when he had taken her hand and he knew for a fact that he had never felt that before. But whatever it was, it needed to stop because he knew without a doubt that he would mess it up.

Any time he became even remotely interested in a girl, he made a complete ass of himself. Or she realized that she was head-over-heels in love with someone else. But either way, it always ended up badly. And there was no way that he could handle _that _right now on top of everything else.

"You just need to forget about her, Viktor." He told himself out loud. "Focus on your game."

He repeated this like a mantra until he reached his apartment. But that night his dreams of death and darkness were replaced by those of a beautiful blonde woman.

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The next day at practice was a blur. A surreal blur.

As usual, the starting lineup was scrimmaging the reserve team. Unlike a real match however, Viktor was allowed to catch the snitch as many times as possible within the hour of time that was allotted. Once he caught it he would release it, wait a few minutes, and be off searching for it again immediately. It was a new strategy that their team had adopted in order to give Viktor more time seeking and to allow the chasers to actually score some points.

Although the scrimmages sometimes got a bit bloody (it was Quidditch after all), they were usually kept well under control, as no one wanted to injure their own teammates. This scrimmage however, was like nothing Viktor had ever seen. It seemed like every few minutes a penalty foul was being called or a player was being escorted off the field and into the nurses' tent. Once, he could have sworn that he saw Igor hit his own hand with his beater's bat before calmly landing his broom and walking matter-of-factly into the little white tent on the edge of the field. However, he quickly dismissed this as his imagination.

But no matter how much he attributed to imagination, Viktor couldn't ignore the facts. And the facts were that all of the players from the bench had been substituted in to keep the match going and even they were quickly becoming injured. A line was steadily forming outside of the nurse's tent and it was becoming obvious to Viktor that something unusual was going on. It seemed like it was becoming obvious to his coach as well because she suddenly blew her whistle and let out a tirade of expletives followed by, "What in the bloody hell is going on here?"

He touched down and followed behind her as she furiously pushed through the line of players and threw open the tent flap.

Immediately Viktor knew what the problem was.

Nurse Metanova was examining a player in a traditional white nurse outfit with an impossibly short skirt, white tights, and high heels. It looked like a naughty role-play costume and for the first time in his life, Viktor suddenly wished that seeker was a more injury-prone position.

She gave him a knee-weakening smile before asking in a dulcet voice, "Can I help you?"

Before he could respond that she could indeed help him, the tiny forgotten woman that had been standing in front of him spoke in her usual cutting voice. "I need a word with you, Ms. Metanova. Immediately."

He watched, dazed, as Coach Hawkeye yanked the bewildered nurse across the tent and out of earshot. Realizing that he hadn't been the intended recipient of that disarming smile, he sullenly joined the rest of his teammates at the entrance of the tent.

Although he couldn't hear what was being exchanged, he guessed the direction of the conversation. His theory was confirmed when he watched the nurse's facial expression shift from confusion, to disbelief, and then finally to extreme embarrassment as her cheeks flooded with color.

He would have felt bad for her if she wasn't the most alluring woman he'd ever seen. As it was, all he felt was desperate attraction.

However before he could consider his feelings for much longer, he was quickly hustled out of the tent by his Coach and forced to finish another hour of practice in which he caught the snitch significantly less times than before due to his distracted mind, which kept reforming images of Nurse Metanova in her little white outfit.

After practice was over he began to make his way off the practice field and into the locker room but stopped abruptly when he spotted a lone figure in the distance walking slowly towards the disapparating grounds. Without considering the consequences, he dropped his broom and ran after it.

He slowed down to a walk as he reached her side. She turned her head only slightly to look at him and said, "Oh, it's you" in the most dejected voice he'd ever heard her use.

"Are you alright?" he asked quietly, suddenly feeling very shy.

"Oh yes, I'm fine." she responded after a brief pause. "Only completely mortified. I don't know how I'm going to look anyone in the eye ever again."

He didn't say anything for a moment and she added, "I mean I just didn't see anything wrong with it. It's practically the same thing Nurse Kuznetsova always wears."

Viktor wondered if he needed to explain to her that while that was true, Nurse Kuznetsova was also a middle aged woman who outweighed the new nurse by 3 stones and didn't exactly evoke the same emotions. Although he felt this was pretty obvious, he could tell by her disheartened expression that she didn't understand so he decided to do his best to explain things.

He cleared his throat uncomfortably before bravely beginning. "Let's just say it doesn't look quite the same on you as it does on Nurse Kuznetsova."

She stared up at him for a moment uncomprehendingly before grinning sheepishly. "I did make some small alternations. And I added the heels. I thought they looked cute."

Viktor looked at said heels, which were currently dangling from her hands. Without her shoes she was even tinier than he had realized. She would probably only come up to his chest.

"I just don't know how I'm going to tell my brothers. They were so looking forward to it."

Realizing he had missed some crucial information, Viktor asked, "Explain what?"

"That I can't get them tickets." She signed. "I had planned on asking Coach Hawkeye for 3 tickets to all the home games for my brothers, but there is no way that I can face her now. It's just too embarrassing."

"Well they can sit in my box. It's always empty."

Upon seeing her shocked face, he hastily added, "If you think they'd want to."

"Want to? Are you kidding! They would absolutely die to sit in Viktor Krum's personal box." "But what about your family and friends?" she added. "Won't they mind?"

"No one will mind. Really." He didn't mention that he didn't _have _many family or friends.

"Wow. Viktor, I can never thank you enough for this. This will mean the world to my brothers." She bit her lip and looked up at him through her lashes, obviously embarrassed. "Do you mind if I call you Viktor? I know we haven't properly been introduced."

"I would be honored, Nurse Metanova."

She smiled happily up at him and extended her hand. "Please call me Karina."

He accepted her soft little hand in his own large one.

"Karina." He tasted the word on his tongue, relishing the feeling. "A beautiful name."

She inclined her head in thanks but did not meet his eyes. He thought he detected a faint blush rising to her cheeks.

"Well I guess I should be going now." She said abruptly, still staring at her feet.

He looked around for the first time \ and realized that they were now in the center of the disapparating grounds.

"Thank you again for your help. My brothers will be eternally grateful."

"Anytime—

She graced him with one more dazzling smile before turning in that familiar way and disappearing with a loud crack.

—Karina."

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OK for those of you who have read this story already, you'll realize that I've made a few changes but that the story is still mostly the same. I've realized though how short the chapters were, so I condensed them into one long chapter. Hopefully I'll update again this week because I'm on vacation from work and my fiancé is out of town . Anyways comments are welcome!


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